Any apparent exception will end quickly, and is usually a legacy from a time when the people were needed.
Franchise tracks the dominant military arm pretty close to exactly. The Swiss are free because of their fights in Pike formations. Most of Dark Ages and Medieval Europe’s were not free, because the dominant military arm was cavalry. As the dominant military arm moves to infantry, the franchise and freedom expand.
When a society becomes militarily mass-mobilized, all the men get the vote. When a society is militarily mass-mobilized and it’s industrialized, all the women get the vote because they are needed to run the industry while the men are away fighting.
Militarily mass-mobilized societies require that the citizens be healthy enough to fight. In WWI, the British were aghast at the number of men who were ineligible for the draft because their health was too weak, or they were too short, and so on. They did something about it.
Agricultural societies tend towards the patriarchal, because much of the work requires men’s heavy muscles. Horticultural societies, where women can do the work, tend towards egalitarianism. Likewise, hunter-gatherer societies in climes where gathering provides most of the food, tend towards egalitarianism; the exception here is when the most valued food is gathered by the men. In traditional Eskimo society, for instance, where the men provided essentially all the meat and the women processed it, was not egalitarian.
Humans have three sources of power: military, productive, and (in modern societies) consumptive. Consumers are not useless in our society, but consumption is still the weakest leg of the tripod. The rich are happy to consume more, after all.
The conditions for widespread prosperity have faded. We no longer have mass-mobilized armies, but professional standing armies, and we are moving towards smaller armies with more robots, both autonomous and remote-guided.
Technological progress has made manufacturing far more efficient, and it requires far less people. The rest of the economy, unless it is required for manufacturing, now matters far less. Most service work is not highly valued and does not translate into military power, and extraction labor is a minor part of most economies.
The final source of power for ordinary individuals is simply the threat they pose to elites. As we move away from the mass-mobilized “just need a rifle” military, this fades as well. To the extent it still exists, it is being managed by the time-honored “oppression” method, with new technology allowing for a Panopticon State which would have made Orwell pine for the weak and limited surveillance of Big Brother.
This is not to say the commoners are entirely powerless. The full power of denial of area techniques shown in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere hasn’t been properly appreciated. These strategies would have worked just fine in the First World. Drones are cheap, and, in principle, could be manufactured by ordinary technicians. These aren’t F-16’s; you can make them in your garage.
Still, mass mobilization warfare is no longer the model, factories are not begging for more workers, there exists no longer any large expanses of land needing to be conquered in the name of colonialism, administered, or farmed.
As for money, banks make it, not people. We may move to a world where we fully appreciate that money is made out of thin air and reclaim control of money for the public, but so far the movement has been in the other direction–printing more and more of it for rich people.
At this point, most people are superfluous. As such there is no reason for elites to allow them freedom, power, or prosperity.
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